If anyone can find more pixels for me i would appreciate it.
Thanks y'all.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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"y'all" fills a legitimately useful gap the English language has. Other languages have a word like this.
Edit: also something cool I just found out, some languages have a way to disinguish "we" (you and I), and "we" (me and the rest of us, not you). It's called clusivity and is missing from European languages. Many indigenous languages of the Americas and Oceania have this, as well as Vietnamese and northern dialects of Mandarin.
English used to be like other European languages too. We had thou/thee for singular, and you/ye for plural, and for respectful singular. Eventually, people began using it as respectful singular for everyone, and so it just became singular and plural, eclipsing thou/thee. Around this time, the you/ye accusative/nominative distinction was also lost, so now we just have you.
If you're curious, the you/ye distinction worked like this: "you" was used for the subject (the doer) of the sentence, and "ye" was used for the object (the done to). you/ye are analogous to I/me.
"You come with me." (plural you)
"I come with ye." (plural ye)
As a result of the loss of thou, we also lost the conjugation of verbs related to it, like "art" instead of "are", and "-st" or "-est" for other verbs ("goest", "thinkst", etc). It used to be that "are" was only for plural pronouns, but now both "you" and "they" can be singular.
And if you're curious about what happened to "-eth", evidence suggests this was for a long time a typographic feature, and it was pronounced "-s" as it is today. It was used exactly like "-s". "He thinketh" would have been pronounced "he thinks".